Thank You. My advice to all of my clients - including this one is that - Unless you are GM and making a million of something, the hardware design should deviate the least possible from whatever reference design or development system you are using.
It is just not possible to save enough money on production runs of 100, or 1000 to justify the software costs to support changes to hardware that are not very important. Additionally software takes time and lengthens the critical path - increasing your time to market. My advice is pay a small amount more if necescary for hardware - a few dollars a piece on 100 boards is cheap. Or you will spend alot more on software. Do not get me wrong - I am an embedded developer - nothing makes me happier that a successful struggle to get that first LED to light on a new board. When you take my advice - I make less, the task is not as rewarding - pluging an SD card into a board and having it just boot right up, is really good for the client - but it does nto pay my mortgage and warring with a recalcitrant hardware and winning is intellectually rewarding. In several instances this client DID change their design to reflect exactly that advice. In some they did not. After a full day with the client - it is my view that the boards are sufficiently Fubar that they can not be fixed by software. I eventually had to JTAG the board and the JTAG is reporting the processor is halted, and that it can not get it to run. Though there might be some design issues - like not bringing out UART0 pins making debugging much harder, I beleive the most fundimental problem is with the board assembly. Several parts were installed 90 or 180 degrees off. Or not quite on their pads. This is outside my scope. I am old enough and my eyes are just not good enough to find and fix placement and soldering errors on SMT boards. The client is currently working with the hardware engineer on the boards. I beleive they are trying to either remove everything non-essential, or build a new board with the barest minimum of hardware. I spent a whole day with the client working on the board. -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beagleboard/368fc622-c7d6-4dfb-b425-4167a7ae7a46%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
